As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Host information handling system based multi-pathing software is used generally to provide high availability to storage when multiple paths exist through a fibre channel storage area network, for example. Such systems are commonly available for disk-based direct access devices. When a path to storage fails, the multi-path driver generally reroutes input/output (I/O) operations to the storage system through an available redundant or fail-over path. Since the device in this instance is direct access, the multi-path driver is generally not concerned about the status of any I/O operations that are interrupted as a result of a communication path failure. As a result, the multi-path driver will generally retry interrupted information exchanges assuming they were never completed.
In the case of sequential storage devices, e.g., tape drives, however, this mechanism of multi-path fail-over error recovery is insufficient. For example, in a sequential storage environment, if data was written to media and the communication path failed while an operation status was being returned, an attempt to retry the operation through the redundant path may cause data to be written twice, resulting in inconsistent data on the media. Further, in tape backup fibre channel environments, generally, there is no technology capable of rerouting error recovery operations for sequential devices from a failed primary path to a secondary or fail-over path. Current fibre channel recovery standards generally only define link error recovery procedures on the same path as an original information exchange.